'Get a reality check': Tony Robbins says you should expect your dreams to be destroyed

In a video interview for Inc, he explained that “society does not prepare us for what’s really required to be successful in life and in business.”

Despite the appeal of timelines and goals and calendars and to-do lists, he says we’re wrong to think that life is a straight line.

“There are no straight lines in nature,” he said. “The way things grow in reality, is they move up kind of in a circular pattern, they come back a little bit … they wind their way up. That’s how stock markets grow, that’s how business ends up growing. Nobody just goes straight up and keeps going straight up. It doesn’t work that way.”

You have to expect setbacks along the way, he says. And you have to learn to “discipline your disappointment.”

He continued:

“So for those people that say, you know, ‘Oh my god, my dreams are destroyed,’ get a reality check. They’re supposed to get destroyed … I don’t know anybody who’s been successful in life and business who hasn’t been devastated multiple times. The only difference is they get back up immediately.

“They stop telling the story about the devastation or the disappointment or the person that took advantage of them or stole money from them — that happens to all of us in business sometimes. That’s how you learn, unfortunately. But if you keep growing, if you put yourself in a position where you will not be denied, you will get to where you wanna go. “

If it was easy, he said, the hard truth is that you wouldn’t appreciate it as much. Those setbacks, those dreams that felt destroyed, make your eventual success that much more fulfilling.